Two days ago, I tried to change my American Airline ticket to an earlier day. The agent won't change it for anything less than $650.

I tried to explain to her that the new flight is flying in a few hours, the seat is a perishable good that she is unlikely to find any taker in the meantime, any new money I give her is pure profit for them (free money with almost no incremental cost to AA), and they get to relinquish my original seat with a lot more time to re-sell it to someone else.

She asked me if I see other flights from another airline. I told her that Delta is offering me another flight for $450 and they will have to at least match this price to make any sense for me to switch. I can even overpay a bit because I have a partial refund from the original ticket.

She said - "But we already have your money". I thought I mis-heard her because I feel a bit being held as hostage. But she said it twice!! Basically, she told me to pound sand. Anyhow, I bought from Delta in the end.

Today, I got an email from AA about their Chapter 11 with a nice video from their Chairman.

It's true that AA already has my money, but they could've had my money twice AND re-sell my original seat once more to someone else. I talked to another agent later and turns out that the agents don't get any commissions from making a sale. No wonder why they weren't more aggressive to earn my business and the attitude seems a bit "arrogant".

I had dinner with the President of INSEAD North America few nights ago and I learned that the North America alumni forum is coming up. The forum list reads like a group of really accomplished and well known people.

This got me wondering. How many alumni from business schools will actually make it big? Who will be truly world famous?

Unlike many business school ranking on career satisfaction survey or international metrics, this has a bit of raw, cut to the core, kind of feeling to it. Fashionable MBA ranking metric changes every year (to sell more papers???). This metric tends to be more stable overtime. Having said that, this doesn't measure the ROI of a particular MBA program or the responsiveness of the alumni network. If you're interested in which school you should apply to, you can read more from my classmate here.

Rather, my goal here is very simple - which business school is graduating extraordinary individuals - ignoring whether the school is really nurturing them or just simply good at picking them among the applicants.

To find graduates who have made it I ran a search on how many executives with profiles on Forbes and Businessweek with mentions of each institution. I only ran this for INSEAD, Harvard, and Stanford. I was going to do Wharton, Kellogg, and IMD too, but these schools have names that are a bit harder to filter out (e.g. Wharton has a huge undergraduate program). Feel free to add these in the comment section.

This is the raw data:

You can use this method to do it for your favorite school with these keyword combinations - e.g INSEAD, Harvard, or Stanford with their many strange name combinations (is this an intentional branding strategy...?)

Note that this method includes everyone with references to the school (e.g. who worked for the school or graduates with EMBA, PhDs, etc...). I also included the # of alumni and the size of the class in case you want to figure out the "efficiency" of a school at churning out extraordinary people. MBA/year is taken as of 2010. For INSEAD, this has increased gradually over time from ~50 MBAs/year five decades ago to 980 MBAs/year today. What I really want is number of living alumni who are between 40-65 years old, but I don't know how to get that.

If anyone knows a cleaner data source, a more global data source, or a more comprehensive data source (e.g. includes politics) feel free to leave me a comment :-)

Ricky Wong

Hey there!!

You can call me Ricky. I'm a technologist, business person, and a student of life. This blog documents my observations and discoveries. I worked at Google, studied at INSEAD and UCSB, and have lived in France, Hong Kong, California, and Singapore. My passion is in building (hopefully useful) things. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Please don't feel alienated because of this "global digital native" persona. I actually prefer talking to people directly. Oh, btw, "Kin" is my cantonese name. This is how you write it "键". I can tell you what it means next time we meet.